


Running Is Something That We've Always Done Well

by tiger_moran



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 07:30:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiger_moran/pseuds/tiger_moran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sebastian Moran has always been good at running, until now. (Missing scenes from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; present Moriarty/Moran with past Moran/Watson)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running Is Something That We've Always Done Well

 Moran has always been good at running.

   He runs now, until he’s knocked backwards, felled like a tree. He registers only the blow, like a punch in the side, although some distant portion of his brain informs him that he’s just been shot (not the first time this has occurred, after all) but though he feels the impact; though he falls, there is no real pain. Still keyed up with anger, with adrenaline coursing through him, he cannot feel anything else. Not a fatal wound, he realises, and that’s enough, and he runs again; pauses; composes himself, then shoots, and downs another of his prey.

   All in all it’s not his best work – not some elegant masterpiece of stealth and silence, painting pictures in blood upon floor and walls; a tableau with a corpse as its centrepiece and his signature a bullet-hole perfectly placed in its head. Everything is a mess; even if this were not entirely his doing, and now, with all becoming silent and still around him, now he feels the pain in his hip. Blood spreads still on his shirt and he walks stiffly now, putting more weight on his left leg. He snaps instructions in brusque German at the remaining men still milling around him, but switches back to his native tongue to snarl under his breath, “Useless bastards.”

   He wonders what the professor will make of all this.

 

   Colonel Sebastian Moran, veteran of India and Afghanistan ( _dishonourably_  discharged) has always had the luck of the devil, so people say, and the bullet has only grazed him. He cleans the wound himself, gritting his teeth against the chemical sting of the iodine. Doesn’t need to do this, of course; the professor can whip up the finest doctors a man could desire at the drop of a hat, but Moran prefers it this way. Doesn’t like to let others close; doesn’t like their hands on him, even to heal him.

    There was a doctor, in Afghanistan. Young; naïve, maybe, but keen. His name… his name doesn’t matter. Moran wishes he’d never so much as heard the man’s surname and he never called him by his Christian name. He recalls though his blue eyes and his kind smile; his patience and a gentleness of touch even though Moran knew in an instant that this fellow was stronger than he appeared. He’d tolerated Moran’s curses with good humour as he picked bits of shrapnel from the colonel’s leg, and he appeared to grow wise to the fact that Moran seemed – after initially cursing at the pain – to have graduated to insulting the doctor instead simply because he could; merely to get a reaction.

   “Pretty boy,” Moran had sneered. “What are you doing here? Don’t look old enough to be out of school yet.” Even though Moran himself – hardened campaigner that he was – was hardly old either.

   “I assure you I am perfectly old enough and fully qualified,” the doctor said, and jabbed him rather forcefully with the forceps. “Oh I’m terribly sorry, old chap.”

   Moran laughed, and idly made a bet with himself that he could bed the doctor within three days.

   Two days only though, it took, or a little under, before they coupled – heated and hurried on the table where men had bled; died, even (which did not make it the worst place Moran had ever fucked – not by a long shot). Mouths pressed tight together; fingers interlaced and bodies rutting together in that primal rhythm of the kind that transcended boundaries of class and race and language and culture. As far as Moran is concerned sex is sex and if he has the urge he’d sate it with anyone who seems open to his advances, regardless of whether they are a man of high rank or some tart in the gutter; whether they speak English or babble at him in some foreign tongue of which he understands only fragments. It’s all the same to him. The only important thing is that they don’t get too close and that love remains very, very far from the equation.

 

   Turned out maybe the doctor was more experienced than he seemed – at least in one regard. “You’ve been practising with the entire regiment, have you?” Moran sneered as the doctor knelt before him. “Taking their pricks in your mouth one after the other?” He tangled his hands in the doctor’s hair, wanting to hurt him, just a bit; wanting to wipe that amused smirk off the man’s face. There weren’t many who were able to render Sebastian Moran temporarily incoherent on their first go.

 

   “Oh,  _fuck_ ,” was the best the colonel could manage, and he’d had to cling to the edge of the table then to keep himself from falling off as he spent into the doctor’s pretty mouth. He was almost tempted to return the favour, just to stop the bastard looking so smug. Didn’t feel like it though, and the doctor seemed content to let Moran bring him off by hand – just a few swift strokes before he spilled over Moran’s fingers, slumping against him with a contented sigh.

   “Why’d you join up?” Moran asked after, sitting with his back to the wall, knees drawn up. He rolled up a cigarette between his strong fingers.

   “To help people.”

   “Could have done that back in England, and had a gaggle of admiring old ladies swooning over you there.” Moran lit the cigarette, match-light flaring gold in his eyes momentarily, and smirked.

   “It’s hardly the same thing.”

   “More your scene though, I’d have thought.” Moran took a long, hard pull on the cigarette before offering it to the doctor, who took it, his gaze meeting Moran’s as he did so.

   “I can do more good here, saving soldiers, than back in England treating old ladies’ bunions.”

   Moran said nothing to this, only sat in ponderous silence, wondering about the doctor. He was taunting him; playing with him like a cat with a mouse, of course. The doctor needed licking into shape, certainly, but there was an edge of steeliness in those blue eyes.

   “Why did  _you_  join up then?” the doctor asked after taking a drag on the cigarette.

   Moran turned his head away; shrugged; pressed his fingertips together in his lap. “Because I’m running.”

   “From what? Or… is it a  _who_?” The doctor looked at him, probably expecting tawdry tales of some jilted bride or the like. Too much the romantic, Colonel Moran thought, but he could not have obliged him with that manner of answer anyway, even if he had wanted to. Other men live by the motto ‘love them and leave them’. Moran would leave, always, but never love. He was always adamant that this would remain so. The other party might love, and then he’d run, but he’d never loved any of them back.

    “Everything and everyone,” he said.

    “Ah, it’s that dreadful.”

    “You don’t know the half of it.” He took the cigarette back when it was offered; let his gaze flick back to meet those blue eyes again. So close he could have kissed him again with barely any effort. He didn’t. He placed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and got to his feet. “I’d best be off.” He offered the cigarette to the doctor again but the doctor waved it aside, so Moran pinched out the end and stuck it behind his ear. “Well, be seeing you around, Doctor.”

   “I’m sure I will, Colonel.”

   And they had, in private; clandestine meetings; snatched moments of hot kisses and two sets of hands – one a surgeon’s, one a soldier’s – tugging at clothing; fumbling for warm skin; to touch; to grope, with words gasped out at the pinnacle of their mutual passions. Meaningless words, usually, but sometimes not.

   That’s when it had to end, Moran decided – when they ceased to become mere nothings tossed out on the brink of physical release. When after still there were more words and one, especially. One word. One name. When one night they lay side by side, the doctor idly trailing his fingers over Moran’s bare chest. Moran lay very still, staring up at the ceiling. Even his breathing seemed constrained, as if he were trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible, shrinking from the doctor’s caresses.

   “What’s the matter?” the doctor asked, pressing himself closer to the colonel.

   “Nothing.”

   “Sebastian?”

   Moran stared. “Don’t call me that.”

   “I thought we-”

   “I don’t want you to call me that.”

   “I’m sorry.”

   “Doesn’t matter. Just… don’t call me that.”

   The doctor looked wounded, though he said nothing, and Moran counted that as a victory. Sometimes – just sometimes – he didn’t need to hit or stab or shoot somebody to hurt them. In retrospect, of course, Moran thinks maybe he should have just killed the doctor then, but blessed with perfect eyesight he may be, but he can’t see into the bloody future, now can he?

    At any rate, they had never lain together again after that night. Moran had strenuously avoided the doctor after that and had soon forgotten about him. Just another conquest in a long line of conquests, and certainly not the first to try to get too close. Moran hadn’t even given him another thought, not until recently.

 

    That’s what got him booted out the army in the first place – not wanting to let anyone close. The colonel is a man with impeccable self-control, endless patience and the cold, clear clarity of an intelligent killer. Yet step too close, into his private space, and everything gets hazy about the edges; suddenly he’ll begin to yield to emotions and primal fears he can’t quite suppress and he’ll strike like a cornered tiger. Takes after old Augustus in many regards – can’t escape the old git even if he runs to the ends of the earth – including in his willingness to hit; to hurt, though with the old man it was mostly the drink that tipped the balance in the end. Sebastian though… he doesn’t need the booze inside him to make him lash out. He just  _does_ , and the British army, it turns out, does not take kindly to men – however brave – who assault a commanding officer. Not even if said commanding officer, a blithering idiot by the name of Markham, made an unwanted advance and Moran was obliged to break the man’s nose to get the message through his thick skull that he was not some weak-willed Mary who’d just turn around and take it from some dirty old toff - even though there was a part of him that was almost grateful that the man did not beat around the bush or try to decorate his lust up in false finery and call it something else, like  _love_. Who needs love? Sex; companionship, maybe, but not love, and maybe those crude advances were far better; far more tolerable to Moran than those of the doctor. Too full of himself though, Markham; too much a coward and a bully for Moran’s tastes. He had friends in high places though, the pompous ass.

   “You’ll pay for this, Moran,” he’d spat, around gobbets of scarlet blood. Got Moran kicked out; shipped home in disgrace. Moran had laughed, knowing that the battalion was all the weaker for keeping Markham and losing him, but it still stung – to have served his country loyally for years (regardless of his motives for doing so) and to have put his own life on the line to save his comrades, only to have those above him turn around and kick him in the teeth for his pains. It wasn’t that it was unexpected though - he’d had the same from Augustus often enough, no matter how many times he’d tried to play the dutiful son. He has plans for Markham still, but he’s biding his time. Patience is a virtue, even if he has very few of those these days, and besides, the professor keeps him busy.

   “You did well, under the circumstances,” Moriarty says now, watching him, his tone bleak and almost –  _almost_  – without a hint of warmth.

   “Mm,” Moran says, noncommittally. Sometimes even he can’t quite tell if the professor is being ironic or not, and he’s troubled by the reddish-dark stain on the white shirt lying crumpled on the table beside him; the ragged bullet-hole through the garment; the wads of cotton wool stained with his blood scattered about him. He’s courted death too many times to count – facing down savage men and beasts alike – but it never concerned him so much then as it does this time. Other times if he failed his life was forfeit, but that was all. Moran would very much like not to die yet – in fact he fully hopes to live to a very grand old age so he may spit on the graves of the rest of those toffee-nosed bastards who told him he’d never amount to anything - but one shouldn’t become a soldier if one is not prepared to lay down one’s life if needs be. If he’d failed this time though; if the bullet had passed through him a couple of inches over, he’d have let Moriarty down, and that’s infinitely more terrible than merely dying.

   “You survived,” Moriarty says, as if he can read the colonel’s thoughts. Probably he can. Moran is a card player (and cheat) himself; he knows about the tells and the subtle signs that give away a man’s innermost thoughts and feelings, even when they don’t know they’re doing it. He knows that to almost anyone else he can compose himself and yield little, but to the professor… he may as well not even bother trying to hide anything. The man  _knows_  – he probably knows everything; every little sordid thought; every dirty little secret locked away in the colonel’s brain - and it gives Moran the chills and a strange thrill all at once to think of this.

   “Not entirely unscathed though,” he says bitterly, tossing aside the final stained wad of cotton wool.

   “Then you will do better next time, hmm?” Moriarty’s voice is constructed entirely of tenderness now, and he’s there before Moran, so close they’re touching; trailing his fingers over the graze on Moran’s side. There’s the stink of iodine and spilled blood hanging in the room. It’s dim in here, under one dull gaslamp, but Moriarty’s eyes glitter like cool stars.

   “Of course.” Moran drops his head, but Moriarty reaches to draw his gaze back up.

   “Good,” he says, holding Moran’s head between his hands, so lightly – with the gentleness another person might use in cradling a child - but with the additional force of so many years of conditioning behind it that it makes Moran utterly unable to even contemplate pulling away. Whatever Moran is, he’s used to bowing to the commands of those above him – from dear old pater to the professor – and though he tries to run he cannot always escape. He might even have bowed to Markham had the man not been such a snivelling fop.

   Moriarty smiles at him – a smile that shows his teeth - and his thumbs lightly brush over Moran’s cheeks. “I would so hate for anything to happen to you, Sebastian.”

    “I appreciate your concern, Professor.”

   “You had best put a dressing on that injury.”

   “I will.”

   Moriarty grins still, before leaning in to press a kiss to Moran’s lips. It’s quick and very nearly chaste and his lips are dry and cool.

   Moran swallows. It’s just a job; the professor is just his employer, just like anyone else who can afford to pay for the colonel’s skill with a rifle. If Moriarty kisses him sometimes; if occasionally he leads Moran to his bed and takes him with the strength of a man who knows how to use his fists as well as his brain, but also with surprising kindness; if sometimes Moran has awoken the morning after, still in the professor’s bed but with the space beside him empty and cold and felt strangely empty himself; if sometimes at the height of passion Moran has lost all sense of himself and called out  _James_ , that doesn’t mean anything. That’s just sex. It  _can’t_  mean anything, because Sebastian Moran doesn’t love anyone but himself and if Moriarty really cared for him as anything other than an employee upon whose skill and discretion he can rely, Moran would have to run again – wouldn’t he?

   He remembers the sick dread approaching panic he felt earlier, when for a few moments he had thought the professor dead. He remembers the bright fury that coursed through him and drove him through the woods after his prey, turning him from cold dispassionate assassin to vengeful killer. He had run away from Moriarty then, but now he has returned to him.

   “Do not run again, Sebastian,” Moriarty says. A command? An instruction? A suggestion? Moran doesn’t know and is afraid to consider which it is, and which may be the worst. “You don’t need to keep on running, and  _I_  need you to stay, by my side. I need you.” Moriarty clasps both of Moran’s hands in his now, squeezing them.

   “Professor.”

  “I will need you more than ever very soon, in fact.”

   “I’m glad to hear that.”

   “Finish tending to that and then come and lie down with me.”

   “Yes Professor.”

 

  
   Moriarty probably barely even registers that Moran is here, in truth. He is lost in his own contemplations, thinking about that damned Holmes fellow, no doubt. Sherlock Holmes seems to occupy the professor’s mind in a way Moran knows he never will. Still… he lies with his head against Moriarty’s chest, listening to the professor’s steady heartbeat, and even if Moriarty isn’t thinking of him, it’s good enough for Moran.

   He catches himself thinking about the doctor. It’s hard not to give thought to the man who tried to kill him earlier (even if Moran was, at the time, doing his utmost to put a bullet through the doctor’s head); who brought tonnes of bricks crashing down upon the professor and gave Moran those moments of dread, and though he’s not certain he thinks it was the doctor who shot him in the forest too. It seems to him that he has to kill the doctor, or the doctor is going to do him in, and how utterly shameful would that be? One of the very best marksman in Europe; in the world, even, taken out by a mere ex-army surgeon? Moran has never quite had to recourse to killing his ex-lovers before, no matter how troublesome some of them have been, but he’s prepared to make an exception for Dr. Watson.

   “Sebastian,” Moriarty says. “Shhh.” Even though Moran has said nothing, but still Moriarty knows what he’s thinking. “Go to sleep; you need your rest.” He runs his hand over the back of Moran’s head, as if he’s petting a dozing cat.

   Moran wonders now what would happen if the professor did die. He needs Moriarty’s money, definitely, but also his guidance; his controlling hand. He doesn’t  _want_  to keep on running any more, not really. He wants excitement and danger but also stability, not to have to live by card-sharping and committing petty little killings that any hired thug could perform. Deep down maybe he even wants affection. It’s just that it’s easier to cut and run; to get out while he can; to hurt them before they can hurt him.

   At least, in the past it’s always been easier. Things are different now. If escaping the shadow of Augustus Moran is hard, escaping the shadow of James Moriarty makes the former seem like a trivial nothing by comparison. He can’t run now; he knows that. The professor had him cornered and collared and caged a while ago now. If Moran runs he’s reeled back to Moriarty’s side, drawn in on invisible thread tied onto barbed hooks that are sunk deep into Moran’s heart. 

   Just as long as the professor’s heart keeps on beating though, Moran thinks maybe he’ll be all right.

 


End file.
